2025 read #11: The Green Ages by Annette Kehnel.

The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability by Annette Kehnel

Translated by Gesche Ipsen

281 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2024)

Read from January 29 to January 31

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I expected this to be a book about social ecology and its evolution through the centuries. The lovely cover, the title, and even the jacket flap copy certainly suggest an examination of crop rotation, coppicing, and common land, and how those traditional lifeways might be integrated with renewable energy for a wholesome solarpunk future. The book touches on some of that, but it isn’t Kehnel’s main focus.

Instead, Green Ages is mostly concerned with economics: communal abbeys, beguinages, microfinance, circular economies, and so on. Important things to think about, just not what I anticipated. And Kehnel does little more than introduce some ideas; she rarely digs deeper. A typical topic line: “Diogenes and the origins of the ‘tiny house’ movement.”

Like other academics with competent but uninspired prose, Kehnel writes in a faintly patronizing, “let’s learn about this together” voice directly out of a freshman textbook. (Or perhaps that’s just the style common to translations from German; I recall that Forest Walking had a remarkably similar vibe.) A typical sentence: “They were medieval influencers with a high impact factor.”

Overall, Green Ages was worthwhile, but didn’t quite deliver on the vibe of its packaging. I’m really not an economics girlie, so I can’t say for certain, but I feel like this book doesn’t offer much there beyond broad generalizations. Perhaps I’m merely disgruntled. Now, though, I want a book that actually documents the ecology of medieval lifeways.

2025 read #8: Normal Women by Philippa Gregory.

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History by Philippa Gregory

580 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 4 to January 22

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Everything in any given society is the result of a choice. The choice may have been deliberate, something coded into law to achieve a stated purpose on a documented date, or it may have been a gradual drift from a former attitude, but it was a choice either way. It’s endlessly frustrating that a significant political faction is either ignorant of this basic fact, or choosing to obfuscate it to ground their appeals to “traditional values” in some myth of “it’s always been this way, it’s natural.” In human culture, nothing is natural; nothing is a default. To pretend otherwise is to attempt to enforce your own preferred choices on others.

This book is a vast documentation of the choices that have been made in England regarding the roles, liberties, limitations, and expectations placed upon women since 1066. Gregory’s dexterous prose turns a potentially dry recitation of people and places into a compulsively readable narrative, equal parts inspiring and enraging. From the imposition of oppressive Norman laws, to the wholesale invention biblical misogyny in William Tynsdale’s translation, to the creation of binary sexes by elite men of the Enlightenment, to the cultural vilification of single mothers in the 1970s, Gregory traces the step-by-step creation of today’s gender hierarchy, drawn up in imaginary lists of differences between women and men, and enforced through courts, the pulpit, and the university.

Hand in hand with the laws and social movements meant to demonize and marginalize women went acts by the elite to create an enclosed, landowning, cash-driven society. The loss of connection to the land, and the prosecution of those who formerly could make a living off the common, created the conditions for colonialism, extractive capitalism, and the carceral state. I’ve often said the English aristocrats first colonized their own working classes; Normal Women documents the sociopolitical connections between classism, misogyny, and the invention of modern inequality:

The tradition that women work for their families without payment, and that men dedicate themselves to wage earning, became established by the enclosures of common land in the seventeenth century — long before the rhetoric of a ‘breadwinner wage’ was invented.

In an era when the worst impulses of the elites — grasping for absolute power, artificially inflating prices for necessities while stripping the working population of livable wages — are racing toward fruition, the history of these cultural choices is a bracing, infuriating, necessary read.

2024 read #142: Cunning Folk by Tabitha Stanmore.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore

232 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 15 to November 21

Rating: 3 out of 5

Reading this book immediately after Magic: A History wasn't serendipity; I had Cunning Folk checked out from the library and waiting. It provides some of the depth I had longed for when reading Magic. As a history, Cunning Folk offers a Peter Ackroyd-like sampler of primary-source anecdotes from aristocrat and commoner alike, spanning from the Medieval through the Early Modern period. It isn’t memorably well-written or especially eye-opening, but it’s solid enough.

2024 read #141: Magic: A History by Chris Gosden.

Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden

465 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 15 to November 15

Rating: 3 out of 5

It's been a long time since I regularly read nonfiction. When I say I struggled with this book, that’s entirely on me. (And on the election. And on life stress before that.) Gosden’s prose is dry and a touch academic, but should be quite readable to anyone whose attention span hasn’t been fried by the last four, eight, twelve years of ~everything~.

And right in the middle of reading this book, we got set back so many decades, and have so many decades of work ahead of us to undo the damage, if it can even be undone.

Magic is a broad overview (perhaps too broad) of the role and practice of magic in human societies over the last forty thousand or so years. The scope of Gosden’s thesis tends to crowd and minimize each region and time period, with sometimes unfortunate results. It’s one thing to say that life during the Ice Age is beyond the conception of modern minds; it’s quite another to write “Understanding Chinese thought and action requires considerable imaginative effort, but is definitely worthwhile.” Wild to see something that amounts to the cliche of the “inscrutable East” get published in 2020.

Gosden’s occasional otherization aside, I would love for any of these chapters to get expanded into a full length book. My own bias would be for Paleolithic, Mesolithic, or Neolithic cultures, or perhaps for Early Modern learned magic, but I would adore a more in-depth examination of anything in here.

2018 read #17: The Age of the Horse by Susanna Forrest.

The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History by Susanna Forrest
370 pages
Published 2016
Read from September 22 to October 1
Rating: 4 out of 5

I think it's fair to say that this book taught me to love horses. Or at least to better understand those people who do love horses. I'd always viewed horses and horse people with lower-class skepticism, narrowing my eyes and making (possibly) unfair assumptions about anyone with the monetary resources to maintain an equine hobby. Through Forrest's sensitive, discerning prose and wide-ranging horse's-eye-view of our commensal history, I grew fond of the horse's profound empathy and heartbroken over my species' millennia of mistreatment and abuse of these sensitive animals. I feel no desire to enter a life of subsistence farming alongside a plowhorse, myself, but while reading Age of the Horse, I found myself wishing that we could democratize (which really means to socialize and to redistribute) access to horses. Not the sort of access that amounts to sticking your kid on a pony at a petting zoo, nor even the therapeutic post-traumatic riding covered in the final chapter, but something longer term, a richer emotional bond of patience and mutual benefit.

Oh well. An idle dream, like so much else that would do good in this world.

Most likely it was due to my own lack of reading practice these last two years, but at times I felt that Forrest's exquisitely turned phrases could get in the way of actually conveying her meaning. I often had to stop and reread sentences and grew only fuzzier each time I did so. Again, that's probably because my brain has gotten so slack of late. I also felt that the chapter exploring the horse's position in Chinese history strayed a bit in the direction of exoticism and otherizing, with its emphasis on the obscenely rich main beneficiaries of modern China's totalitarian capitalism and their obscene displays of wealth. (Why did the chapter on the superrich also have to be the chapter on China? I'm sure our own domestic superrich have their own baffling, alien quirks to quietly anthropologize.) Aside from that, Age of the Horse is simply lovely, full of the same gentle empathy that we could all stand to learn from Forrest's horses.

2018 read #13: Queer City by Peter Ackroyd.

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day by Peter Ackroyd
233 pages
Published 2018
Read from May 29 to June 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

A topic that is equal parts important and neglected by mainstream history, queer history seems like a compelling fit for the wide-ranging research and anecdotal panache of Peter Ackroyd. Many passages in Queer City are packed with all the rich details you'd expect from Ackroyd, but all too often, he runs up against the same constraints that pushed Sapphistries in the direction of abandoning primary documentation altogether in favor of imagination: the sheer, sad lack of documentation of gay love and sex through most of history. After a certain point, Queer City becomes a sort of arrest register for all the men with the ill fortune to be swept up in official persecutions over the centuries. This in itself serves as a window into queer history, as bigotry and homophobic policy congealed into their familiar forms. But these sections of the book expose one of Ackroyd's stylistic weaknesses. He has a keen eye for detail and revealing quotation, but is lacking somewhat in synthesis and shaping a larger picture, often leaving that up to the reader. Nonetheless, Queer City is an essential read, at turns amusing and horrifying.

2018 read #6: White Rage by Carol Anderson.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
166 pages
Published 2016
Read from February 9 to February 21
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

When I was young, one excuse my father scraped up for keeping my brother and I out of public school was a never-defined bogeyman named "busing." The way he spoke of this dread thing made me fear it like a punishment, though to me it sounded a lot like riding the bus downtown with my Grandma, which left me confused -- because what could me more fun than riding the bus downtown with my Grandma? I only learned what busing was much later, by which time I had mostly forgotten the venom in my father's voice and how determined he had been to avoid it.

I never went to public school for more than a few months. Not a few months at a time -- a few months total, out of my entire childhood. Busing was only one excuse. The fact was, my father was delusional and paranoid to the point where he could not function, and me living in a car traveling aimlessly across the country with him was merely an incidental side effect.

Fast forward to 2018, when the entire country is paralyzed and unable to function thanks to the delusions and paranoia of somewhat less than half of the electorate. The America I had glimpsed with my father inside gun shows and Oklahoma gun shops -- what back then seemed like a fringe, with its Deep State conspiracies, toxic hatred and masculinity, military rations, survivalist manuals, and monolithic Whiteness -- now parades openly under the light of a thousand tiki torches, its pathetic sociopathy given a physical shape in an orange would-be dictator whose whinging insecurities are applauded as manly resolve. Despite my upbringing, despite seeing the fetid roots of Trumpism with my own eyes way back in the early '90s, I had been completely floored by ascent of White populism. How could an obvious fascist, with all the charisma and legitimacy of a toy from a Crackerjack box, have swept into power? What happened to the vaguely comforting soft-liberal platitudes of acceptance and progress I had absorbed from cartoons and PBS as a kid, then so scorned from my rarefied Social Democratic perch in my 30s? Growing up in a car, absorbing a picture of American sociology from '90s kiddie pop culture, had sheltered me, hidden the ugly realities of American Whiteness from me until the paranoid gun show crowd suddenly ran every branch of government, and the America I believed I had known turned out to be a Saturday morning fiction.

White Rage is required reading for any of us who entered the Age of Trump with a sheltered, privileged perspective on race. One by one, Anderson picks apart the pleasant myths of Civil Rights progress to show the pale termites destroying the substance behind the façade. Every step of the way, from dismantling Reconstruction to destroying public schooling rather than desegregating, from suppressing the Black vote with poll taxes and literacy tests to suppressing the Black vote with voter ID requirements and gerrymandering, and all the insidious and rarely-questioned "everybody knows" myths of American public policy, Anderson presents a methodical picture of White America's inability to tolerate Black American success and advancement. Each chapter is an emotionally exhausting survey of the evils that systemic, deep-rooted anti-Black racism has perpetrated, climaxing with the triumph of the Southern Strategy, the Nixon-Reagan Supreme Court, and the simultaneous release of crack into the inner city and the criminalization of Blackness under the "War on Drugs." It is horrifying, appalling, enraging. And it makes me despair for any true progress in a post-Trump America.

As with many books about conservation or biodiversity, Anderson closes with a hopeful epilogue musing on the possibility of positive change, if only enough of us would unite to repudiate White rage and build a truly free and inclusive future. And as with all those books about saving the environment, the hopefulness of that epilogue (written and published before the 2016 election) is in a sense more depressing than the litany of horrors that went before it. Right now, at least, it doesn't feel like much will change. Trumpism and anti-Black fascism have been political forces throughout White America from the very beginning; the facile belief that "all of that was in the past," which informed so much of my worldview in the '90s and '00s, was in fact part and parcel of the sociopolitical effort to reframe and minimize the Civil Rights struggle. Maybe things will get better in a generation (assuming some insecure fascist dictator doesn't push a button, on either side of the Pacific), but right now, it's hard to see how.

And that in itself is another vital dose of insight from this book.

2016 read #70: Laughter in Ancient Rome by Mary Beard.

Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up by Mary Beard
278 pages
Published 2014
Read from September 4 to September 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I enjoyed Mary Beard's snark and snappy-but-educational style in her popular history, SPQR -- so much so that, after I finished it, I immediately looked up her other works. This one caught my eye: a book about Roman laughter and jokes from a scholar gifted with that rare combination of wit, writing ability, and authoritative knowledge. What could possibly be better?

I suspected my error the moment inter-library loan put the volume in my hands and I saw it was from the University of California Press, published as part of a line of classical lecture series. I still enjoyed Laughter, but it was a dense, technical work, full of the convolutions of postmodern scholarship in the humanities. (Beard vows in the preface, "My aim is to make the subject of Roman laughter a bit more complicated, indeed a bit messier, rather than to tidy it up.") This is a worthy goal -- fatuous simplifications and over-general "explanations" are a pest to be rooted out and burned away -- but the English language has yet to arrive at a fluent way to handle the necessary backtrackings, subordinate clauses, and complexification of statements this entails. I'm having a hard time even getting across what I mean (though, to be fair to myself, I've been out of academia for six years, and it's unseasonably hot and sticky as I struggle to write this review). Beard pushes bravely through the thickets of po-mo social science and emerges with, mostly, a surprisingly readable work, but popular history this is not. It's fascinating, largely because of Beard's skill at making such thick stuff readable, but for a casual reader who keyed in on the title and expected hilarity, it's a bit of a disappointment.

2016 read #49: Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
293 pages
Published 2000
Read from June 11 to June 14
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Way back when I first began this blogging project / reading more project, one of the first books to make a powerful impression on me was Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. At the time, dazed by her elegant fluency and my emotional resonance, my sense of kinship, with her ruminations on life, love, and the American West, I marveled, "Solnit, more so than almost any other author whose words I've happened upon, speaks to me, articulating thoughts and feelings my fingers are too clumsy to share." I stand by that initial enthusiasm for Getting Lost, despite three subsequent years of books both wondrous and inane, but nowadays I might add the caution that it was Getting Lost as a work, as a statement I interpreted through my own filters of background and experience, rather than Solnit as an author, that spoke to me so meaningfully.

My to-read list is crowded with Solnit's other works and essay collections, yet it's taken me until now to read another. I wasn't avoiding her work, precisely; I attempted The Faraway Nearby but, at the time, found myself confounded by the literary density of what I faced. I opted for some disposable fantasy novel or other in its place, and just haven't gotten around to trying again. Perhaps there was some half-conscious pessimism involved, a suspicion that Getting Lost was an anomaly, an accidental congruence of outlook and identification, irreproducible, an island microenvironment isolated at the crest of a desert range.

Where do I begin with Wanderlust? It is a work of tremendous ambition and erudition, a marvelous display of traced connections and cogent inferences. The chapter on mountaineering alone nearly made Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind superfluous three years before its publication, sketching in much the same history with the addition of non-Western perspectives, such as the Japanese tradition of Shugendō, which Macfarlane (so far as I can recall) didn't even mention. But Solnit explores so much more than the cultural history -- from Wordsworth to Thoreau to Muir, from formal gardens to English gardens to walking clubs -- of Romantic nature-worship and Anglophone conceptualizations of the virtue of outdoor recreation. She swerves into compelling tangents on gender and sexuality, on cultural partitions of "acceptable" spaces, on histories of public assembly and revolution. Why is it that, despite all the histories I've read that have touched on the French Revolution, I didn't learn about the march of the market women on October 5, 1789, until I found it in a history of walking? Why is it, for that matter, that I never heard of the popular protests and demonstrations against the First Gulf War until now? With the Orlando massacre and the threatened ascendancy of reactionary fascists in the public sphere, the poignancy and eloquence of Solnit's passages on oppression and resistance sank deep into me.

As with any conceptual history of such breadth and ambition, there were inevitably some chapters that didn't interest me much, various passages of dry material between my particular highlights. Nonetheless, this book is a tremendous achievement and a compelling thesis on the vital importance of public spaces and civic pedestrianism. Despite the more recent social movements toward "walkable cities," Solnit's closing chapters on the automotive deserts of suburbia remain as direly insightful as they were sixteen years ago.

2016 read #45: Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane.

Mountains of the Mind: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit by Robert Macfarlane
282 pages
Published 2003
Read from May 22 to May 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

After several false starts and abandoned novels in the second half of this month (so much for that splendid pace I'd been setting!), I was more than eager to get started on this one. I've been trying to obtain Mountains of the Mind for well over a year now, probably ever since I finished The Old Ways and felt myself hankering for more from Macfarlane. I'm somewhat impressed by his works, primarily The Wild Places, and everything I knew about Mountains suggested it would be a worthwhile read. A sociological history on how people (well, Western Europeans, at any rate) conceptualize and respond to mountainous terrain intrigued both my anthropological side and my outdoorsy side; Macfarlane's byline promised the cachet of his often-fluent nature writing. That extra year or so while I waited for the library network to act upon my book request only added to my anticipation.

For all that buildup, Mountain proves to be... pretty much alright? The thesis statement of the bold opening chapter, promising nothing less than a history of landscape perception across several centuries, is the best part of the book -- an appropriate parallel to Macfarlane's theme of the romantic pull of the unknown, mystery and suggestion rendering to the imagination scenes to which reality is a disappointing substitute. He covers the West's progression of concepts and ideas regarding mountains well enough, chapter by chapter, but the book as a whole feels somewhat lacking, little serving to distinguish it from any number of history books. Macfarlane's later prose brilliance is only suggested here in the occasional bit of wordplay.

2016 read #26: Walking on the Wild Side by Kristi M. Fondren.

Walking on the Wild Side: Long-Distance Hiking on the Appalachian Trail by Kristi M. Fondren
143 pages
Published 2016
Read from March 29 to March 30
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

This one is a bit of an oddity, both as a book on the Appalachian Trail and within the context of my recent (post-college) reading habits. I found it during one of my periodic searches through the Suffolk County library catalog for new-to-me hiking narratives. Outwardly, Walking on the Wild Side is packaged as if it were yet another trail memoir, with an "outdoorsy" font, a generic title that could apply to just about any AT narrative, and a cover photograph of booted feet propped up in leisurely contemplation of a view. With movie versions of Wild and A Walk in the Woods recently in theaters, I've been expecting a wave of copycat memoirs to peak sometime in the next year or two; I assumed Wild Side was the first to appear, and promptly put in an ILL request.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that Wild Side, while no doubt packaged and marketed to capitalize on the copycat wave, is actually a sociological study upon the subculture of long-distance hiking upon the Appalachian Trail, the result of interviews and participant observation. I almost discarded the book upon this discovery, before my own academic instincts reemerged from hibernation (my BA is in anthropology) and I found myself unable to resist that dry, dry thesis prose. It was almost like discovering an old favorite pair of shoes in a closet, and finding them still comfy.

As is often the case with sociological research (and with science in general), Fondren merely takes the time to properly document aspects of the long-distance hiking subculture that were already obvious to anyone who's read the memoirs and watched the YouTube vlogs. Proper documentation is nothing to be sniffed at, and to be fair, Fondren expands upon certain behaviors and places them within a sociological context, which I found illuminating. Academic works tend to err in the direction of scrupulously contextualizing any statement or assertion, which can make for dull or repetitive reading, but it's a useful practice, and in any case, Wild Side was a brief read. What makes it odd is how Rutgers University Press is so evidently trying to market this dry and rather niche study in order to cash in on the current long-distance hiking craze, even going so far as to have various professors awkwardly attempt to provide blurbs for the back cover. ("Upon finishing a chapter, the reader is anxious to move on to the next one," raves Professor Alan Graefe of Penn State.) The trick worked on me, and it worked on Suffolk County, whose libraries (which typically avoid university press type material) have obtained four copies and counting, so I guess I can't fault them. It just seems like an unexpected move for a university press, because it's, well, a trick.

2015 read #49: Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo Saro-Wiwa.

Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo Saro-Wiwa
311 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 10 to September 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I know next to nothing about Nigeria. I know of Shell Oil's corruption and the pollution in the Niger Delta. I have a simplistic notion of Delta natives struggling against an all-powerful international corporation to save their homes, their livelihoods, and their health. I have an even sketchier picture of a long series of corrupt presidents and dictators and military coups going back to independence from the UK. Before the British, all I have to go on is a series of barely remembered masks and statues and bronzes seen in the Met, all blurred together under a mental "West African" label. In short, I know much more about Nigeria than most White Americans do, but my store of knowledge has never inched above pathetic.

Looking for Transwonderland is a hybrid between the memoir of a woman raised in England revisiting Nigeria many years after the political murder of her activist father, and a comic tourist narrative of the frustrations and hidden charms of traveling the country. For the most part, Saro-Wiwa tends to avoid digging deep into the economic and political complexities of Nigeria, offering a general gloss on its system of profiteering and kickbacks, opportunities and potential lost to greed and cronyism, but I feel like I only gleaned about an article's worth of geopolitical and humanitarian insight from this entire volume. The tourism sections were interesting in their own right, and introduced me to locations and historical events that I enjoyed reading up on via Wikipedia. But never having read much in this genre (and that mostly limited to the internet), I don't have anything to compare it to, and not much to say about it.

2015 read #41: Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck.

Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
214 pages
Published 1962
Read from August 9 to August 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Only my second exposure to Steinbeck, Travels is my first brush with his non-fiction. I read Of Mice and Men close to a decade ago, and recall little of substance from it. I was impressed by Steinbeck's Twainian wit and amused by his multi-page panegyric to the wonder, the promise, the optimism of the mobile home park. (There's a bit of retrofuturism you won't see revived, though Steinbeck's mobile home utopia lives on in the current fad for "off the grid" bubble homes.) Steinbeck's observations of segregationist "Cheerladies" is one of the horrors of the too-recent past, sanitized in favor of pictures of the bravery of the Black children escorted into school, that wider culture has been content to ignore and forget, and which go a long way toward explaining the sad reality of our present.

I'm still digesting this brief but vivid work; I lack the critical breadth of experience and fount of words to pick it apart in detail. Sufficient to say that I would readily consider Travels one of the better books I've read this year.

2014 read #124: Creating Black Americans by Nell Irvin Painter.

Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present by Nell Irvin Painter
366 pages
Published 2006
Read from December 26 to December 31
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

The phrase "white guilt" is commonly used to mock social progressives by the more regressive elements of society. It is also employed by activists of color to deflate the self-aggrandizing tendencies of white "allies" who mouth progressive phrases but crowd black (or Native, or Latino, or Asian) commentators out of the spotlight. Yet on a more basic level, "white guilt" describes something that all white Americans should seek out, an antidote (however limited and feeble) to our entitled ignorance and privileged worldview.

This book isn't perfect. It's written as an undergraduate textbook (or possibly even high school textbook, if high schools bothered with such things as actual history), presenting easily digestible facts and figures, repeating them as necessary, and summing up key points at the conclusion of each chapter, as if coaching the reader for a multiple choice midterm. The sardonic humor and understatement of Painter's The History of White People is sadly lacking here, though it peeps through in one or two spots. The broad scope of Painter's history here necessitates a greatest-hits approach, barely skimming the broad motions of any given era; deeper understanding, inevitably, means seeking out more detailed and specific works, with Creating Black Americans as only the starting point. But this is a necessary book. The general story of African American history we absorb in this country -- captive Africans made into a slave labor force, the horrors of plantation life, Lincoln setting everyone free, then total invisibility until Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King fixed everything in the 1960s -- is as glib as it is inaccurate and incomplete. The fuller story told here fills in important gaps in American history: the brief, precocious rise of black civil rights during Reconstruction, including a black senator and six black congressmen; the white terrorism that defeated Reconstruction and essentially re-enslaved the Southern black population; the anger and violence of the 1970s; the endless ways the white power structure undercut black opportunity, from poll taxes to discriminatory lending practices, and how these contributed to the decay of black urban centers and prefigured the more ubiquitous financial inequalities of the present day. These are essential parts of American history, the vital context that makes the current racial tensions and abuses of (white) power part of an ongoing (and sadly obvious) story.

This book joins The History of White People, Chang's The Chinese in America, and Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in my embryonic (but growing) "white guilt" reading list. It would be easy to say something like, "The people who really need to read these books are the white regressives who think 'white guilt' is a derogatory term." But that would be denying my own ignorance and privilege. Every American should learn this generally forgotten or ignored history. Goodness knows I'm still ignorant as hell, and need ever more histories from non-white and non-privileged perspectives going forward.

2014 read #96: The Chinese in America by Iris Chang.

The Chinese in America: A Narrative History by Iris Chang
413 pages
Published 2003
Read from October 7 to October 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Nonfiction books in general, and histories in particular, are more difficult to assign some arbitrary grading metric than novels. I more or less weigh the quality and depth of the information provided against the dexterity of the presentation, including prose, editing, and illustrations. (Why editing? Well, when no one involved in the process of producing a major tome bothers to check if substantial portions of identical information or quotations are repeated in separate chapters, for example, as in Robert Hughes' Rome or W. B. Bartlett's Mongols, I see that as a significant detraction from the book as a whole.) A book can be excellently written but supply little in the way of new or interesting history, retreading the same old paths of European royalty and wars viewed from the winning rulers' perspective. The Chinese in America takes the opposite course, examining fascinating and entirely under-reported experiences and perspectives from the documents and oral histories of Chinese immigrants and American-Born Chinese, but presenting it in commonplace news-magazine prose. It's a readable mixture, and the material Chang covers is significant and essential (in large part because it has been almost universally ignored by mainstream history), but I do wish she'd avoided so many lazy truisms about seeking the American Dream.

2014 read #2: The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter.

The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
403 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 2 to January 6
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Like most white leftists, I want everyone to get along. What racial prejudices I absorbed from my white trash upbringing, I make every effort to contain and reject; my anthropological training inclines me to think of "race" as a damaging social construct long overdue for the scrap pile, while simultaneously informing me that it just isn't that simple. Centuries of economic, social, and "scientific" separation and marginalization aren't overcome in a single generation, and as depressing as it sounds, it's really only been less than a generation since Americans (as a generalized society) began making discernable progress toward overcoming "race."

Which makes books like this extremely valuable, and disturbing in their implications. Irvin Painter presents her exhaustively researched history of the evolution of the concept of American "whiteness" in erudite, mildly sarcastic, eminently readable prose, doing a superhuman job at presenting the lies, bigotry, and disgusting peccadilloes of "race theorists" in a restrained manner. I could never manage such restraint; this sort of thing makes me too angry. Demonstrating just how flimsy and hypocritical the roots of race ideology have been, it just makes me angrier to think how prevalent -- how overwhelming -- such bullshit is throughout society today.

I heartily recommend this book, and I've added Irvin Painter's Creating Black Americans (which perhaps I should have read first, except I've owned this one for years) to my to-read list.

2013 read #66: Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women by Leila J. Rupp.

Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women by Leila J. Rupp
236 pages
Published 2009
Read from May 10 to May 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

[2024 edit: I wrote this review early in my own gender and sexuality deconstruction. At that time, I was also a recovering would-be social academic with a data-driven bent. This review is bad. No way around that, and no excuse for it. I’m leaving it up in order to sit with my past ignorance.]

The social sciences are vital, indispensable for a complete picture of human motivations and behavior. Human beings cannot be understood on a purely biological basis, nor should conventional social or religious attitudes be left unquestioned. Many social sciences do not lend themselves to numbers and statistical analyses, so in some cases non-traditional or postmodern approaches may yield insightful and informative contributions to our understanding of human behavior. Unfortunately, postmodern approaches can also lead to a bunch of twaddle and poppycock.

Queer and gender studies, by their avowedly subversive natures, are especially prone to this. Which is doubly unfortunate, as queer and gender studies are essential to establishing the healthy sort of society I would like to live in. The very importance of queer and gender studies makes them ideal for (or perhaps susceptible to) the promulgation and promotion of political causes, such as identity politics. There is also an incredibly self-defeating idea out there that the conceptual framework of science itself is inherently masculine, and that all those oh so "emotional" and "intuitive" women should, instead of claiming science as a gender-neutral pursuit, come up with their own alternative approaches to understanding the world. Which, if you give it a moment's thought, is every bit as limiting and as prejudiced as the actual institutional sexism you would assume we'd all like to be fighting.

That all comes together to dispiriting effect in certain portions of this book. The second chapter is by far the worst offender. It's supposedly a musing or speculation upon the idea of woman-on-woman love in prehistoric times. Given how little real information we have to go on, some carefully contextualized speculation would make for interesting reading. Rupp, however, ignores the possibilities of social science altogether, quoting or inventing "creation stories" to prioritize the female procreative role, and giving credence to the whole "primordial earth goddess and original matriarchal society" myth popularized by second wave feminist identity politics. There quite simply isn't any persuasive evidence of worldwide goddess worship "suppressed" after a "masculist revolution" deep in prehistory. Which is not to say that such events did not occur occasionally throughout the world. But subscribing to the idea of a global goddess religion and subsequent "masculist revolution," while useful to certain factions of feminism, is about as naive as postulating the lost continent of Mu to explain scattered linguistic similarities. Or, for that matter, as naive as postulating that men are a separate, alien species tainted by a "mutant Y chromosome." Speculations are excellent, except when they ignore what evidence we do have. Speculations that simplify the head-spinning diversity of culture and customs over the last 40,000 or so years are no better than wholesale myth-making. In my view, social science should seek to contextualize and controvert myths, not create them. Likewise, quoting modern novels that treat with the subject of woman-on-woman love or all-female societies in prehistory does not tell us anything about the possibilities of the past; it does nothing but reflect our own modern sexual and emotional sensibilities back at us.

This isn't a criticism of Sapphistries so much as of postmodern scholarship in general. Subsequent chapters aren't as egregious, drawing more from historical sources than modern fiction, but even then the "scholarship" can stretch culturally appropriate expressions of friendship into a modern homoerotic reading not likely intended by the original authors. Again, this is a case of augmenting woefully sparse sources, but it's none too convincing. Unless Rupp's thesis is merely to suggest that women cared about other women in the middle ages, in which case, thesis proven.

Sapphistries finally merits something of its "global history" title halfway through, when historical sources become numerous enough to predominate over modern fictionalizations. The book becomes rather engrossing by the time it visits the cabaret culture of Weimar Germany or the jazz clubs of 1920s Harlem. If Sapphistries had confined all the myth-making and literary speculation to a concluding chapter on the ideologies of recent lesbian feminists, and concentrated more on the eras with substantial primary documentation, I would have gotten much more useful knowledge from its pages. Unfortunately, this scintillation of actual scholarship comes as too little, too late.